Northeast Subsistence-Settlement Change: A.D. 700 –1300

were seemingly more common in the interior, not
directly on the coast. Coastal sites nonetheless may
have been occupied multiseasonally or year-round
(e.g., McManamon and Bradley 1988; Sanger 1996).
This pattern was represented when the French,
English, and Dutch, among other Europeans, first visited
and then colonized the region ca. A.D. 1525-1625
(e.g., Bragdon 1996; Salwen 1978). Archaeological evidence
summarized herein at least tentatively suggests
that coastal sedentism began well before contact, during
Middle and/or Late Woodland times (e.g., Ceci
1990). Other interpreters would suggest that such an
increase in village size and permanence, along with
warfare and other related developments, were due to
contact itself and that they were not truly prehistoric.
In this view, large, sedentary villages were not typical,
if present at all, until European transformations were
wrought on Native groups (e.g., Ceci 1977, 1980;
Chilton 1999). These scholars downplay indigenous
settlement changes before the Contact period, at least
in some coastal areas. Late prehistoric evidence from
across the region figures into our alternative interpretation,
as do Contact period archaeological and
historical data, the latter allowing linkage with the
ethnohistoric record. Again, we emphasize the
archaeological data that we know best, those from
Maine and Vermont and lesser so New Hampshire.
Evidence suggests that some Middle Woodland settlements,
particularly those in optimum settings adjacent
to rivers and marshlands, were occupied by
extraordinary groups seasonally, at least by late Middle
Woodland times, after ca. A.D. 700-800 (e.g., Petersen
and Power 1983; Thomas and Robinson 1979; VDHP
1991). These hunter-gatherer camps were larger than
those typically found during earlier periods and they
somewhat resembled sites associated with early horticulture
during the subsequent Late Woodland period,
except that storage pits were very uncommon at
Middle Woodland sites. Local examples in Vermont
include the Winooski site and others on the Missisquoi
delta, such as the Headquarters site. Unlike their predecessors
in these settings, the later Middle Woodland
settlements stretched over hundreds of meters and
available paleoethnobotanical analyses establish multiseasonal
habitation. Many other Middle Woodland
sites, however, represented small camps like those of
their Early Woodland and Archaic period predecessors,
even upstream on the same rivers, as on the
Missisquoi and the Winooski Rivers in western
Vermont, for example.
With the arrival of farming during early Late
Woodland times, some settlements effectively went
unchanged and these Natives continued to reside in
small camps within the floodplain, indicating that
their camps were still of seasonal duration. This pattern
of seasonal utilization of small settlements during
the Late Woodland period has been demonstrated
through excavations conducted at Highgate Falls on
the Missisquoi River and at Shelburne Pond in
Vermont, for example. In both cases, small camps persisted
from the Middle through the Late Woodland
period, and even into the Contact period at Shelburne
Pond (Petersen et al. 1985; Thomas 1997; Thomas et al.
1996). At Highgate Falls and Shelburne Pond, the
small Late Woodland sites continued to serve as
“extractive camps,” where resources, such as deer,
were killed and processed for use elsewhere, presumably
downstream at larger aggregation settlements
near Lake Champlain. Recent work in the Missisquoi
delta may represent just those larger settlements. The
Late Woodland deposits in the delta extend over a
kilometer in overall length, significantly larger even
than the extensive ones of Middle Woodland time
there. On the basis of subsistence remains, including
significant quantities of maize, as noted above, and
other plant foods, the Late Woodland deposits represent
multiseasonal to year-round occupations along
the Missiquoi delta.
Other large sites are also known regionally, where
early Late Woodland settlements grew sizeable and
even large in some cases, as at the Skitchewaug site on
the Connecticut River in Vermont. Among coastal settlements,
the Goddard site in central Maine may be the
most dramatic example of a large site. Goddard was
occupied most extensively around A.D. 1000-1300 and
presumably served as a trading center. It is clearly
attributable to the early Late Woodland period on the
basis of a huge artifact assemblage, including many
aboriginal trade goods from the north and a possible
association of a Viking coin (Bourque 2001:92-94;
Bourque and Cox 1981; Snow 1980:337). We surmise
that horticulture did not extend much east of the Saco
River and Casco Bay during this period, nowhere near
as far east as Goddard, so farming was not responsible
for the character of the Goddard settlement; trade likely
was. After A.D. 1300, however, horticulture spread a
bit farther eastward to its prehistoric eastern limits in
the Androscoggin and Kennebec River drainages, as
noted above. The seeds of social complexity were at
work by this time and intergroup contacts in northern
New England were considerable in some cases, as seen
with the St. Lawrence Iroquoians to the north and with
the proto-Micmac to the east, for example.
The common presence of storage pits at many
276 Petersen and Cowie